


The Uncertainty Principle

by owlbsurfinbird



Category: Lewis (TV)
Genre: Friendship, Gen, Work
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-01
Updated: 2015-06-01
Packaged: 2018-04-01 10:40:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,479
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4016644
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/owlbsurfinbird/pseuds/owlbsurfinbird
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Does the act of observing someone change their behavior?</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Uncertainty Principle

**Author's Note:**

  * For [divingforstones](https://archiveofourown.org/users/divingforstones/gifts).



> Happy Birthday, divingforstones! Thank you for writing stories that inspire and delight. :-)
> 
> Many thanks to wendymr for beta, Brit-pick, and mentoring. (I've tinkered with it since then, so any errors are mine.)

Lizzie checked her watch. Fifteen minutes till their meeting with the Dean, a potential witness in a case involving a significant theft from the Ashmolean. Her footsteps echoed in the large chamber as she wandered from exhibit case to exhibit case. The notebooks of Isaac Newton—notes on the _'celebrated phenomenon of colours' in his book, **Opticks**_ —were on display.

A rainbow of colors washed the white wall, as light refracted from a prism duplicated the experiment and was reflected to form a single beam directed to the adjacent wall.

A hanging sculpture of metal rods and long prisms cast tiny, shivering rainbows in the corner.

"Aristotle believed that light was a simple, homogenous entity. Newton disproved that notion." DI Hathaway observed as he joined her. "White light is the sum of the rainbow of separate and distinct colors. His experiment set off a revolution in metaphysics."

"It is pretty." Lizzie allowed, as she turned to him. "Not that I care if light is a wave or a particle. Or both, as it says here."

"But you should." Hathaway's mouth curled up at the corner in amusement. "The act of observing a particle changes its behavior. The more precisely a scientist measures a particle's position, the more uncertain the information about its momentum becomes." He scanned the room with an air of satisfaction. "The Uncertainty Principle. A way of thinking that influenced the metaphysical writing of John Locke. Leibnez." He bounced on his toes, hands in his pockets.

She gave him the look she now reserved for those moments when he went off like this. Last week it was a mini-lecture on William Blake's poetry and the nature of good and evil. She'd heard him spout off on everything from the proper use of turmeric in a curry to quorum sensing in bacteria to how _The Game of Thrones_ was deviating from the novels. The last one surprised her, because she didn't think he even owned a television. Then she found out he and DI Lewis and Dr. Hobson were fans of _QI_ and the odd documentary. Seems they had a standing 'family night' of sorts for the three of them to watch telly and endure DI Lewis' attempts to follow a recipe.

She had been over for dinner a time or two. And since her attack in the pump station, she and Tony had been over when her boss and Laura Hobson had made dinner. A celebratory feast, Laura called it. And it was. Her boss was like a chef. Bit off-putting watching him chop julienne carrots with practiced ease, especially given that her main culinary successes involved a jar of sauce and frozen chicken.

It was at that celebratory feast when she found out why her guvnor hadn't been round to see her in hospital much when she'd been recovering from her assault. Tony got up the nerve to ask since he'd been there, day in, day out. Robbie would pop by, then Laura. But rarely her boss. Made Tony wonder, too, if Hathaway was as mean a sod as she’d thought at the beginning of her assignment.

So Tony asked. Protective man, her husband.

Robbie explained that the Lawrie case was based on corrupted evidence collected by an interim team of technicians—improperly trained, not adequately supervised due to personnel changes, job re-classifications and budget restraints. Several of these cases tracked back to people still working within the station.

Laura Hobson, for one.

Although her work was impeccable, her signature appeared as acting super to some of these cases saying that they had completed their work. She had signed to get the paperwork through the system at a time of management upheaval. But she really had no way of knowing how good their work was since it was sent to an outside lab.

"Laura's a perfectionist, but even she couldn't manage the time to re-autopsy every body that came through the morgue," Robbie said.

So—in addition to working on the Lawrie case during the day—Hathaway had spent every evening going through case files—ten years old—and tracked every piece of forensic evidence collected by this particular SOCO team and this particular lab to evaluate whether or not a conviction might be overturned in the same manner as the Lawrie case. He read through the lab reports evaluating every swab, every print, every bloodstain, every hair.

Chief Super Innocent was not going to be caught unawares again. Laura Hobson wasn't going to be called to the stand to defend something she might not even recall. In his research, he found two other cases where the forensic conclusions might be in question regarding a conviction.

And in the process he found information on a cold case that might now be solved by advances in DNA analysis.

Her boss had sat there listening, bit of a blush coming into his cheeks as Robbie Lewis spoke. "He did this for me, too, on more than one occasion. Couldn't ask for a better detective. Or a better friend."

"I would have been there for you, Lizzie, but you were in much better hands than mine." Hathaway had given her one of his rare smiles, self-deprecating and warm. "Between Tony, Robbie, Laura and God, that is. I would've been in the way."

"Might've told Robbie about the kiwi allergy," she had replied, seeing that he was embarrassed by the praise. When they were off duty, she had a hard time calling him 'James' because he was her boss, even though he had asked her to do so. But at that moment, he looked very much like a 'James,' and so she added it to her retort: "James."

"You're my DS, though," said her guvnor, giving her a bemused look at her unaccustomed use of his Christian name. "No way for Robbie to know."

"How did you know, though?" Robbie said. "Not a question everyone asks."

"There's a question about latex allergies on the employment form, Robbie. We do like our detectives to wear gloves, and," Laura said with a smile, "an allergy to latex often means an allergy to kiwi."

"Been wondering why we were getting to wear the nicer, more expensive gloves. I thought it was because you had influence. Should have known it was Lizzie." Robbie grinned at her.

Hathaway had been refilling everyone's wine glasses at that moment, Lizzie recalled, because he hesitated then, bottle poised over her glass, waiting for her acknowledgement—the slight nod of her head or the flicker of eye contact.

And that was part of it, too. This feeling of being trained up. He made a point of trying to get her to look at him, to nod, to express a non-verbal opinion or response. Not because she couldn't do it—came naturally to her, after all. Tony said her eyes weren't just windows to her soul, they were the panorama view.

More than once Hathaway had reached in and plucked a thought from her mind before she was ready to part with it. She remembered cringing the first time he had belittled her skills. "Wanker," she thought. And he must have been reading her mind because he had looked back at his computer and said, "Sergeant, the day I can't read your thoughts from your expression is the day I will give you more responsibility."

She told Tony she planned to quit, no promotion was worth ridicule. Might even be actionable.

"Liz, it's a bollocks way of saying that you are giving away the game. Can't let a witness or a suspect know what you're thinking, you know that."

"I'm only thinking horrible thoughts about him."

Tony had laughed. "Even so. Not the best way to get on with your new boss."

She was on the verge of requesting a reassignment, knowing that it would cock-up the man's career—two sergeants in as many months—when Robbie Lewis was put on their first murder case. She had seen how her guvnor changed when he was with Lewis, how he anticipated the other man's movements, his answers. It was dynamic—almost intimate—those wordless exchanges that seemed to communicate far more effectively than anything she was able to manage.

When Hathaway was with other people, though, he still had a tendency to freeze them out and make them uncomfortable. Prickly. But he grew on you.

New staff at the nick were quickly disabused of their notions that Hathaway was somehow 'too bloody posh to be there' or 'gay for Lewis.' Her guv didn't have many friends, but the ones he had were utterly devoted—and that included the Chief Super.

Of course all of this was station gossip. For her part, she had seen him as initially aloof—block of ice, he was, and as pleasant on a cold day—but able to warm up. Eventually. Seen him melt, too, on occasion: a time or two around Lewis—admiration, she supposed. But also at odd moments with distraught witnesses, bereaved parents, as if he couldn't bear to hold up the cold façade any longer.

He just seemed lonely to her. Now that she was starting to understand him—and even like him to the point of caring—she wanted him to cheer up. She'd heard he was gay. She'd heard that he'd had an office romance with a female DS who was promoted to the Yard. So did that make him straight, gay, or bi? As part of her training she'd completed the required workshop on diversity; she could handle race, no question there, but being sensitive to largely unspoken issues of sexuality and gender was trickier. No way to know except to ask—and frankly, it was none of anyone's business, after all. It wasn't as if it was even important for her to know, except as someone who cared.

She liked to think of him as open to new experiences, as if he would change depending on the person observing. Wave or particle—both and neither—like this experiment played out on the wall that he was studying intently.

She had a couple of cousins that might suit him—quiet, bright, warm. She thought maybe a dinner at her place, game of Scrabble. Something non-threatening and casual. Might invite Robbie and Laura, too. Make a party of it. But which cousin to ask—Michael or Ellie? Both—and let him decide?

She doubted that Hathaway and Lewis and Hobson were together as more than friends, though they seemed inseparable. Tony's jest of calling them The Three Musketeers wasn't far off. And what if Hathaway wasn't interested in sex at all? She knew he'd been in the seminary—maybe he was celibate by inclination or orientation.

His footsteps echoed as he meandered, his hands in his pockets, studying the displays, absorbing it all. Insatiable curiosity, like the elephant's child. He'd remember it all, too. She wondered if there would be a quiz. Wondered why he seemed fascinated by the photos of rainbows on the wall. A new one had been added--different frame and glass--showing the rainbow over Dublin on the day Ireland voted for gay marriage.

He glanced at her, eyebrow raised, as if making sure she was getting as much out of the exhibit as he was. She gave him a wan smile and turned her attention to the display in front of her. A button turned on a light to shine through a prism on the wall. On: a rainbow. Off: nothing. On: a rainbow. There was a dial to adjust the light to increase the width of a single color. When she turned off the light, the prism was just a pretty bit of glass.

A spectrum, a continuum of values, was useful to describe a lot of things from political opinion to autism to sexuality: it might describe her boss as well. And didn't they use a prism as a symbol for people who were asexual just as they used a rainbow to symbolize people who were gay, bi, or trans?

Yes, a prism was used for both, she recalled. If light was shined through a prism in just the right way, it produced a range of colors, a rainbow, a spectrum. Remove the light, no spectrum at all.

One of his more heartfelt rants swept through her thoughts then as she stared at the rainbows on the wall. The matter of individuality. No labels, no boxes, no graphs or percentage charts. Each person is unique with their own gifts and foibles, needs, wants, desires. The sooner society recognized and accepted infinite diversity and infinite combinations, the better. Initially, he'd been going on about a suspect, but at times she wondered if he was including himself in his assessment. He'd rambled on and on.

She'd asked which philosophy textbook she needed to check out. And there had been that rare warm smile, the reward for her patience: "Gene Roddenberry, creator of _Star Trek._ "

So while it was humbling at times listening to him rattle on because he seemed to know everything, he generally found some way to link whatever he was going on about to their current case.

Yeah, she admitted to herself, and sometimes it gave you a different perspective. Like the way he was staring at the prisms now. She sidled up to him. Something about the quality of light must figure in the theft. _Can almost see the wheels turning in the man's head, the way he's thinking._

The Uncertainty Principle. Spectrums. Rainbows. Glass. _Glass._

"When they showed us the photos of the painting from the exhibit, there were reflections of the flash in the glass for that one painting that was taken, but not the others," Lizzie said slowly, surprising herself with how quickly that remembered image burst into her mind. Maybe the man had something there, this Socratic detective method, as he called it. "Wasn't museum glass. Why wasn't it?"

Hathaway tilted his head, his expression pleased. "Good on you. It might be that the painting is of 'uncertain provenance.'"

"We're after the theft of a forgery?" She considered this. "What was it doing in the Ashmolean?"

He glanced at his watch. "No idea." He smiled slightly at her, a bit of warmth lighting up his gaze. "Let's find out. You'll ask the questions. I'll observe. Together we'll shed some light on this." He gave her a wry look to make sure she got the pun, and then hesitated. "Ready, Sergeant?"

He said the title sometimes as if he still couldn't believe that he was her guv. It was a bit endearing, that. Such an awkward guv. But he was _her_ awkward guv. She'd get him trained up, too, in time. She gave a nod and huffed a sigh, favoring him with a rare honorific: "Yes, Sir," as she followed him out of the building and into the sunlight.

**Author's Note:**

> And for Ireland and all the rainbows.


End file.
